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Dreams of Rivers and Seas by Tim Parks

There is a paradox at the heart of Tim Parks's ambitious and compelling new novel. The largest presence in the book is the character who, in one sense, is most absent from it. The first sentence of Dreams of Rivers and Seas announces the death of Albert James and yet he dominates the narrative from start to finish. James was a maverick biologist, zoologist and anthropologist, obsessed, as his son says, "by the forms and shapes of things: of crabs and leaf veins, of beetles and crystals" and by the mysteries of human communication. (Parks acknowledges that he used elements of the life and writings of the uncategorisable English polymath Gregory Bateson in creating the character.) A generalist in an age of specialisation, James drifted to the fringes of academic life, acclaimed as a freethinking genius by some, dismissed by others, including sometimes by his son, as a clever man